by Thomas King
“Like I said, in those days, you had to have a pass to leave the reserve. Signed by the agent. Leroy didn’t pay much attention to that rule, and every time he left the reserve without a pass, that agent would try to have him arrested. And every time Leroy asked that agent for a pass to leave the reserve, Nelson or Wilson would turn him down.”
Even if you didn’t know the story, you knew that this kind of a situation was bound to go bad at some point.
“Nelson or Wilson had a house. Government issue. It wasn’t a big house. The roof leaked a little, and it didn’t have no better insulation than a plastic sack. It was painted white, but that didn’t last long. Cold winters and hard winds stripped the paint away until there was nothing left but the wood. You need me to draw you a picture?”
“Nope. I can see it.”
“So, this one time, Donald the Duck brought his wagonload of booze onto the reserve, and before long, Leroy found him. And not long after that, Leroy got his big idea.”
SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE, and Mimi has me take a picture of her rubbing the dog on the plaque. And then she rubs the guy being thrown off the bridge.
“Rubbing St. John of Nepomuk is supposed to bring you good luck and ensure that you’ll return to Prague.”
“We just got here.”
“Rubbing the dog doesn’t do anything.”
We walk to one end of the bridge, and then we walk back. The sky is overcast. The water is dark slate. We pause in the middle and watch the tour boats go up and down the river.
“You want to take a boat ride?”
“No.”
“You slept in the chair last night.”
I take a photo of the river and the stretch of city on both sides. “My stomach hurt.”
“I know it’s the demons, Bird.” Mimi puts her hand on my back. “They can only hurt you if you let them.”
We continue walking. The tourists have increased. Small groups stand around each of the statues.
“See that woman with the red-lollipop sign?” says Mimi. “She’s a guide. The people around her are part of a tour.”
I look up and down the bridge. There are at least a dozen women with lollipop signs, all different colours. Mimi walks over to the red-lollipop tour, and then she walks back.
“I think it’s in German,” she says. “Let’s see if we can find an English-speaking one.”
“You want to pay for a tour?”
“No,” says Mimi, “but we could stand close enough to hear what’s being said.”
I lean against the stone wall while Mimi goes off to find her tour, and for the first time, I notice the men lying prostrate on the bridge. Most are on their knees, hunched over with their faces on the ground, their hands cupped in front of their heads.
As though they’re praying.
I wonder if they’re monks of some sort, but then I see that they’re really begging. They’re not bothering anyone. In fact, they don’t even look up or say anything as the people pass by.
A silent vigil for alms.
If this were Toronto, they would be on their feet, moving back and forth through the pedestrians, stopping people to ask for money. Some would have signs. Others would be making noise on an instrument. The bravest would be working the traffic at the stoplights with a rag and a bottle of water.
The beggars on the Charles Bridge look as though they have come here to die.
In the distance, I can see Mimi. She’s found her tour. She has her back to the group and is pretending to admire the sky. Each time the group moves, Mimi moves with them, as though she’s dancing with Fred Astaire.
I have a momentary impulse to join the beggars, put my face to the ground with my arms stretched out in front of me. It’s a strong urge that I have to work to resist.
I know if I were to lie down, I might not want to get up.
WHEN BERNIE TELLS the story of Uncle Leroy, she closes her eyes so she can see the story, whole and complete. “I told you it wasn’t much of a house, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“And that all the paint had been stripped off by the weather?”
“You told us that too.”
“And that Leroy had had a little too much to drink?”
Bernie would always pause at this point to let the tension build.
“So, Leroy’s big idea,” she’d begin again, after the proper amount of time had passed, “was that he would paint the Indian agent’s house. But he didn’t have any paint. And nobody else on the reserve had any paint, either. I’m guessing you can see the problem.”
“No paint.”
“So Leroy had to improvise.”
Just the word “improvise” would set Bernie off, and she’d begin laughing. And we’d have to wait until she stopped.
“In those days, there was a store in Cardston run by this Mormon family. They sold all sorts of used stuff, household and farming. Some of it was okay, and some of it was garbage, and if you didn’t know the difference, the Mormons weren’t going to tell you.
“So, after Leroy sobered up, he rode over to Cardston to that store and bought an old milk pail, one of those zinc things with a wood piece for a handle. It was a sorry sight, that bucket. There was a story in the newspapers not long ago about a woman who collects junk like that.”
“Now they’re called antiques,” Mimi told her mother.
“So, Leroy took his junk antique and filled it with fresh cow flops. He mixed in some water, stirred it all up until it was brown and pasty, and went to work. He wasn’t sloppy either. He took his time and painted every inch of the house with cow poop. From a distance, it didn’t look bad at all. And as long as you were upwind, you didn’t notice the smell.”
SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE.
Off in the distance, at the far end of the Charles Bridge, Mimi is making her way back through the crowds. I’ve read the caution in the guidebook about pickpockets, and I pay close attention to the people around her. Not that she has anything to steal. I have the passports and most of our cash.
But thieves wouldn’t know that.
When she gets to where I’m standing, she shakes her head. “You were in combat mode again.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You were watching me like a hawk, in case someone accosted me.”
“I was enjoying the view.”
“And then you were going to rush to my aid. Rescue me from the ogre, slay the dragon.” Mimi puts her arms around me. “So, which demon is this?”
“We should go to the Kafka museum. Oz said the statues in the courtyard are worth seeing.”
“Oz?”
“A guy I met at breakfast.”
“You made a friend?”
“He’s not a friend.”
“If you had more friends, maybe you wouldn’t spend so much time with your demons.”
WHEN THE INDIAN AGENT returned and found his house painted with cow shit, he wasn’t impressed. According to Bernie, he stormed around the reserve trying to find who was responsible. Everybody knew it was Leroy, but no one said a word.
“Course Leroy wasn’t one to leave well enough alone, and each time the agent left the reserve to go to Lethbridge or to Calgary or wherever Indian agents went in those days, Leroy would get out his milk pail and his brush and go to work.”
There was, I suppose, a certain poetic justice in painting an Indian agent’s house with cow shit. And I have to admit that, in my darker moments, I liked to imagine Uncle Leroy as an avenging angel, riding around the countryside with his bucket and brush, painting the exteriors of residential schools and churches, charging up Parliament Hill and redecorating the walls of government offices.
No, it was not a generous thought.
“So, Leroy painted that house three or four more times. By then, Nelson or Wilson could hardly stand living in it, but everyone agreed that it was a nice shade of brown.”
“He ever get caught?”
“Sure,” Bernie told me. “That agent wasn’t no fool. He pretended t
hat he was going off on a trip, but then he doubled back and caught Leroy with the bucket in one hand and the brush in the other.”
There weren’t any photographs of Uncle Leroy, so I had to imagine what he looked like, and what I saw was a tallish, slender man with a face like an axe, broad shoulders and no butt, standing next to a clapboard house, holding a beat-to-shit zinc bucket.
“Nelson or Wilson had Leroy dead to rights, and he told Leroy he had a choice to make. One, he could stick around, in which case the agent was going to go to the RCMP post at Fort Macleod and swear out an arrest warrant, after which he’d come back with a couple of officers, throw Leroy in leg irons, and send him to the penitentiary at Stony Mountain.”
I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be an Indian in those days with the power that Indian agents, the RCMP, and the church had over your life.
“Or two, there was a Wild West show that had landed in Calgary. Captain Trueblood’s Wild West Emporium. And they were looking for Native performers.”
Mimi had gone to the Glenbow in Calgary and found a couple of old posters from the show and a newspaper story. Trueblood’s was a modest affair, thirty performers tops. And it spent most of its time in Europe, playing the smaller venues, places the larger shows such as Buffalo Bill and the Miller Brothers didn’t go.
“Wasn’t much of a choice,” Bernie told us. “Go to jail or join the circus.”
Bernie was right. It wasn’t a choice at all.
“It was only after he left that we discovered he’d taken the Crow bundle with him.”
WE DON’T FIND the Kafka museum right away. First, we get lost and wind up walking in a circle.
“You have the map upside down.” Mimi turns the map over. “See. The museum is right here.”
The place is easy to miss. A white stucco wall. An open gate. A small sign. A courtyard with two copper-green male figures peeing into a small pond. The statues are articulated, and as they pee, their hips move and their penises go up and down.
“This is it?”
“I guess.”
“Two guys peeing in a fountain?”
“Cerny,” I say. “He’s supposed to be famous.”
Mimi already has her guidebook open. “Evidently, he’s the same guy who did the giant alien babies in the park. Along with a statue of Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand from a roof.”
“We haven’t seen that one.”
“Not yet,” says Mimi.
I watch the copper-green men pee in the pond, and I have to admit, the mechanics are impressive. Swivelling hips, moving penises. Mimi circles in for a closer look.
“You know what I don’t see?”
These are the kinds of questions I try not to answer.
“Women,” says Mimi. “Where are the women peeing in the pond?”
“Women don’t pee in ponds.”
“No reason why we wouldn’t.” Mimi walks around the statues several times. “Women can pee in ponds just as easily as men.”
I don’t try to argue with this.
Mimi undoes the top button of her pants. “Maybe I should demonstrate just how easily it’s done.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Remember what happened on Santorini. In Oia?”
“When I went swimming at the bottom of the Karavolades Stairs?”
“Skinny-dipping. You went skinny-dipping.”
“I left my bra and underpants on.”
“Tourists took pictures of you,” I tell Mimi, not for the first time. “Those photos are probably somewhere on the Internet. You know how embarrassed Tally and Nathan would be if they saw naked photos of their mother on Facebook?”
“I wasn’t naked.”
“And then there was that time at Crypt Lake.”
“Okay,” she says. “There I was naked.” Mimi closes her book and fixes her button. “You know, you’re only old if you want to be old.”
BERNIE WOULD GENERALLY STOP the story at this point and make something to eat. Sometimes it was leftovers, and other times she’d cook a complete meal. And she’d only get back to Uncle Leroy and the Crow bundle after everyone had been fed and the dishes cleared away.
“It was a family bundle. Got opened once a year, so there was the chance it had been misplaced.”
Mimi would nod and finish her mother’s thought. “But you don’t misplace something like that.”
“No,” Bernie would say, as though she were talking to herself, “you don’t misplace something like that.”
“And then the first postcard came.”
That was Bernie’s cue to get the old Hiawatha Tobacco tin out of the cupboard. “The first card we got,” she said, “was from Paris.”
There was a picture of the Arc de Triomphe on the front. On the back, Leroy had written, “In Paris. Bundle is with me and safe. Home soon. Leroy.”
“He doesn’t say why he took it.”
“Nope.”
“Maybe he wanted something that reminded him of home.”
Bernie wasn’t so forgiving. “Or maybe he thought he needed something to impress the White people in that Wild West show. Something he could use in the show. So they’d hire him. So he wouldn’t wind up at Stony Mountain.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. “It sounds as though he planned to bring it back.”
“Sure,” Bernie would say, “but whatever he had in mind, the day that Leroy left was the last time we ever saw the bundle.”
SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE, standing in the courtyard of the Kafka museum, watching two articulated sculptures pee into a pond.
“I suppose we should get a picture,” says Mimi. “For my mother.”
“You could just tell her about it.”
Mimi shakes her head. “Don’t think words can capture the majesty of the moment.”
So I take a picture of Mimi standing by the fountain with her hands on her hips.
“Did you get one with their penises on the upswing?”
I can feel my blood sugars dropping. It’s not a pleasant sensation, akin to discovering you’re in the middle of Saskatchewan in winter and out of gas.
Mimi moves in closer to the sculptures. “I like the way their hips swivel back and forth.”
I recognize trouble when I see it. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Would you be embarrassed if I just touched—?”
“Lunchtime,” I say quickly.
Mimi pulls her hand back. “You want to eat lunch?”
“Only if you do.”
“You just ate breakfast.” Mimi shakes her head. “This is what happens when you don’t get enough sleep.”
When you’re in a strange city, you don’t have many options for finding a good place to eat. You can go with a recommendation in the guidebook or you can rely on local knowledge. Guidebooks are notoriously unreliable. Much of the information in them is old and out of date. Chefs change, restaurants close.
Worse, an international conglomerate moves in, buys the place, and uses the restaurant’s reputation to sell prepackaged, processed food to an unsuspecting public.
Local knowledge is all well and good, but as we don’t speak Czech, this is not an option. In addition, there is always the chance of falling prey to the gangs that work the tourist areas of the world. “Yes,” a kindly older man tells you, “there’s a restaurant just down this alley. Very good. Very cheap. It’s where locals go. Follow me. I’ll show you.” So down the alley you go, and you turn a corner, and that’s the last time anyone ever sees you.
I share these thoughts with Mimi.
“You might want to tell Kitty to keep her ideas to herself.”
“I’m not catastrophizing,” I tell Mimi. “Do you know how many people were murdered in Prague last year?”
“Do you?”
“No, but I bet it’s more than Toronto.”
“What about New York?”
“Sure,” I say, “but we’re not in New York.”
Mimi ignores me and c
onsults the guidebook. “How far do you want to walk?”
I don’t believe in cosmic laws, but I’ve come to accept that there is an inverse relationship between good restaurants and wherever we happen to be. The better the restaurant, the farther away we are from it.
Mimi closes the book. “Okay,” she says, “I’ve got the perfect spot.”
“So, how far do we have to walk?”
“Not far,” she says, and she heads off down the street at a slow trot.
MIMI HAS A THEORY that travel makes time stop. Or at least slows it down. Her reasoning has a simple elegance. When you’re home, you fall into routines. These routines are so familiar that you do them without even thinking or noticing the passage of time. You get up, have breakfast, check your emails, go to work, have lunch, finish work, come home, have dinner, watch some television, go to bed. And every so often, you look up and wonder where in the heck the time went.
When you’re travelling, everything is new, and every minute is taken up with decision-making.
Tick tock, tick tock.
Exhausting.
Today it’s been breakfast, the Kafka museum, articulated men peeing in a fountain, and it’s barely noon. We still have most of the day left to fill.
You went to Rome and didn’t see the Colosseum?
You stayed in Barcelona and didn’t see the Gaudi church?
You spent a week in Amsterdam and didn’t go to the Rijksmuseum?
Athens and you only saw the Acropolis from your hotel window?
Tick tock, tick tock.
The first obligation of any vacation is that you experience as much as you can. Wandering the streets, coffee in cafés, sitting on park benches don’t count.
MIMI’S IDEA OF “not far” turns out to be far enough.
We walk for at least half an hour. If I had been smart, I would have timed it in case I needed to use it as an example later.
“The Nusle district,” says Mimi, “and we’re almost there.”
My hip is beginning to hurt. My toes feel as though the ends have been filed off.
“And here we are.”
An ordinary street. It could be anywhere in the world. I could close my eyes for a moment and open them to find myself in Ottawa. Or San Francisco. Or Montevideo.